Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whose presidential campaign has become a crusade for "religious liberty" and the rights of the unborn, told social conservatives this weekend that they should be skeptical of allowing more Syrian refugees into the United States. "Are they really escaping tyranny, are they escaping poverty, or are they really just coming because we've got cable TV?" Huckabee asked, in an audience question-and-answer session at the conservative Eagle Forum conference in St. Louis. "I don't mean to be trite."
Every morning, at the dawn call to prayer, women and children move silently from the Damascus suburb of Douma to the surrounding farm fields, seeking safety from the day’s bombardments by the Syrian government. The walk is part of a surreal routine described by the fraction of Douma’s residents who remain: shopping on half-demolished streets, scavenging wild greens, carrying out mass burials. But not even the fields are safe; recently, medics said, bombs killed two families there — 10 people, including seven children. [...] More than 550 people, mostly civilians, have died in the past month in Douma and nearby suburbs, 123 of them children, Red Crescent medics say.
[W]hy should we take in refugees? Simply because it is the right thing to do, because it’s in keeping with who we say we are, and because we remain collectively a wealthy nation and can afford it. Pride in our moral claims is not limited to any economic class. In fact, the least advantaged are often the most generous. We should do it because we have always regretted leaving people in grave danger instead of taking them in. We should never forget our failure to give refuge to more European Jews before they were marched into Hitler’s death camps. We should do it because the United States wants to be in a position to say to our European friends and the Gulf States, who have been shamefully reluctant to act, that we are doing our part and they should do theirs. (And bless Germany for standing up on this.) We should do it because this a case where we have a practical way to help alleviate ungodly agony.